I like this theory. Perspective of criteria is a much better way to discern which caliber to chose. I champion the .308 for training purposes due to recoil. I have shot plenty of 06's and they kill me. That's just me... recoil is subjective. But if you think about it, the first sniper rifle of the world wars in the American arsenal was a 1903 bolt action Springfield with optics. Soooooo, again we go back to application. I think Gunny Hathcock would argue the 30-06's ability for accuracy. But also there are a lot of new snipers that would argue for the .308. 30-06 effective range with military ammo for sniping purposes... 1200yrds, 308...1000yrds, have people shot further to save lives with either caliber? Priceless!!!!

Tank

This is the exact reason the .308 win was conceived. Many military personel couldn't hit the broad side of the barn with the 30-06. This wasn't because it wasn't accurate it was because they couldn't handle the recoil. The military then told the big arms makers to come up with someting with close ballistics and less recoil.

may have been... I thought it was 30-06... I called BS when I saw it, I think most ammo manufacturers over shoot the speeds. I remember reading remington saying 150 gr scicorros would go like 36XX out of a 7mmRUM.

I am not so sure that any caliber is inherently better than the next. I think they all serve a purpose. Generally speaking.

Bigger cases push bigger bullets faster, until brass quality comes into play. They all have gives and takes. That being said we all have come to personal preferences. That is when the arguing starts.

For what it's worth, I run the 150g GS hv bullets out of a Browning A-bolt 22" barrel at 3230fps. I run the GS hv 160g at 3100fps. These bullets tend to run give or take 100fps faster than conventional bullets. 3200fps from 168g bullets is a little far fetched. Even with a long barrel.

A slight correction here; the development of the 308/7.62x51 had nothing to do with the military wanting to reduce recoil, but case length. The original battle waged by Col. Rene Studler centered on developing a.30 cal cartridge that had (essentially) the same power as the existing .30-06 Military cartridge. In effect, that's what was acheived. The sniping versions of these two rounds used the exact same bullet for many years, the 173 grain FMJBT. In the M72 (30-06) the velocity was 2640 @ 78 ft, while the M118 (7.62x51) was only about 100 fps less, 2550 fps @ 78 ft. Performance in the field was virtually indistinguishable from one another. With the lighter 150/147 grain FMJs, perormance was almost identical. The real reason for the development of the .308 lay in its almost .5" shorter case design. For military weapons production, this has huge advantages. Weapons can be made much lighter, reliability is increased, the ammunition is lighter and the soldier can carry more, etc.. The 7.62 also uses about 5-7 grains less powder to achieve very similar performance. Not much of a concern for you or I, but it makes a tremendous difference to the military. Stop and consider that during Vietnam, Lake City Army Ammunition Plant was cranking out some 21 million rounds of ammo a day, and that was just one ammo plant in operation at that time. As you can see, that 5-7 grains suddenly becomes pretty significant.

The .308/7.62 is inherently more accurate than the .30-06, but we're talking about a pretty minor difference, and that averaged over a great many rifles. Rest assured, there's plenty of .30-06s out there that will outshoot plenty of .308s, but we're talking about individual rifles here. I wouldn't lose sleep over it, especially if I had a .30-06 that shot really well.

They're both good, and they've both done a prety good job for a lot of folks over the decades.